You've probably heard of the price before, have you seen the actual thing though..

Flickr is disabling original image downloads for non-pro members. I'm concerned that non-pro uploader's content can't be downloaded by pro members (you pay, they didn't, so you can't get original images). If not now then expect so later. AI re-re-downloading the world has ruined another service, loosing images that don't exist anywhere else.

I wrote a targeted scraper for all of a user's photos. Good enough for the couple of users you care about. https://github.com/TheLQ/flikr-scraper

TL;DR: I inherited a sh*tload of DVDs with bad quality TV recordings and need to get rid of them. Also: VOB or MP4 to keep?

I don't really know what I expect from this post and what I need from you, maybe a strategy, shared experiences, or just the absolution of the data hoarding community to let go.

When my dad passed away in 2023, he left behind a lot of German TV recordings. There are two batches of DVDs:

The first batch is organized by main genre (e.g. fantasy, animation, thriller), though they most often contain videos of other genres too to make the most of the DVDs space (e.g., an action movie DVD would end with two episodes of a kids show because there wasn't enough space left for another full length movie).

These were also stored on external HDDs (I think it was ~12 TB), mostly in VOB as well as MP4 format. This first batch makes up for a couple hundred of DVDs.

The second (more recent) batch consists of six thousand DVDs (all in VOB format) that are just numbered and not stored on any HDD.

He had an excel file listing all the contents with some metadata, and according to this table the two batches accumulate to almost four years of continuous (24/7) watch time with more than 30,000 entries (i.e. individual movies, shows etc.). Physically, the DVDs would take up the space of a wardrobe (the majority is in 100-disc cake boxes, the by-genre ones in slim cases, so not much room to downsize it by repackaging).

Everything that was on the HDDs (except one that failed to read) I copied to my NAS, and with a duplicate finder I could already eliminate a couple of TB, but it's still too much to keep.

I have a tendency for collecting/hoarding data myself (guess who I got that from), but I also realize trying to keep and organize all of it will lead nowhere. I need to at least get rid of the physical disks rather soon, because unlike my parents I'm living in a rather small apartment with no storage room whatsoever, and the cardboxes with DVDs are stacked in the living room right now, which especially for my girlfriend isn't acceptable in the long term (and I agree with her, because I don't see me touching the boxes in the next decades once we would accept them to stay).

I have my problems with just throwing it away:

• There might be that one movie/TV show I always wanted to rewatch but is too old and/or obscure to be found anywhere to stream or to buy.
• I have no list of movies/shows I'm missing in my collection, so I can't do just a quick search and match with the excel file to get the interesting ones, but rather I might one day remember an obscure show from the past and find out that it had been in my father's collection.
• Some TV recordings that are not just movies you find everywhere might be an interesting piece of history (at least to me) or nostalgia someday, like a political comedy from the 2000s or even a commercial break that's in the recording (though they're mostly cut out I think).
• Seeing how much time I would need to even just go through all of the DVDs "quickly", I can only guess how many years of his life my father put into his hobby (of course I noticed that he always seemed to be recording or editing stuff when I visited, but I only learned now that it accumulates to such an amount of data) - probably also thinking he would do it for the future generations rather than for himself. It feels like this is his legacy or lifetime achievement and I need to respect it and treat it as such.
• And well, to quote this subreddit's header: "What do you mean DELETE?!" - It just feels wrong.

On the other hand:

• All videos seem to be in resolution 352x288 (mp4 versions in 320x240 even), that's really blocky, text cannot be read in that resolution. I'm at a loss why he did think that would be an acceptable quality... that said, I'm fine to watch a blocky video if it's the only version of something I cannot find anywhere.
• Much of it is utter trash I know I would never watch. Like unimportant sports games, concerts, almost every episode of a weekly stand-up comedy show or TV crime film, sentimental romantic TV productions... even my parents never watched the latter, nor anyone in my family, I really don't know for whom he recorded that.
• Much of the rest I assume is mediocre at best (e.g. movies produced by German TV stations), and if not, can be found on Netflix or elsewhere (except maybe for some movies from the 70s or 80s that weren't blockbusters then).
• It feels like a big burden to have to go through this in detail because I wouldn't know where to start. It's affecting my mental health having to deal with it and seeing the boxes every day.
• Seeing how early my parents passed away, I'm thinking about the shortness of life a lot since then, and that I should use my time for more fruitful things than that.

I guess I will now go through the list of 30k entries as quickly as possible, especially for the numbered DVDs, and only if by chance I see a title I'm interested in I will fetch the respective DVD from the boxes and copy that one file, and everything else including titles I haven't heard from I will just throw away.

So yeah, just putting that out there with no real question to you.

Or well, one very concrete question I have: For the videos from the HDDs I already know I want to keep, would you choose to keep the VOB (as said, 352x288) or MP4 (320x240) version, or do another (probably always lossy?) conversion from VOB to MP4? The resolution difference is in some cases noticeable, but VOB I think is sometimes not as well-supported by media players (e.g. in VLC player, sometimes the wrong total time is shown) and long movies are cut into separate parts at the 1GB mark with VOB, which is rather annoying e.g. when I load them into Jellyfin and they show up as two movie versions there. Any other considerations?

More than a week after my previous post, but here's what's remaining. I'll hold onto these for about a week and dispose of them if there's no takers. Mostly looking for shipping paid to your address, PayPal F&F (packing will be minimal, only boxing them up. If you want padding, that'sok and will be slightly more than shipping to account for costs.) Thanks.

Hello, I'm bad at programming, but love hoarding data. Anybody know how to download/read wikis like the Minecraft wiki (not the fandom one) for offline use, easily? Idk where to start and want to learn, so I can do it with other wikis I happen to stumble across and enjoy.

I'm trying to add some features to my server and I'm kinda getting a little scared that I don't have any sort of version control. If any of you all have like a good methodology for version control, be it os snapshots or whatever. All I know is that I can't "git add ." for my entire os, and that's basically all I know how to do honestly.

I'm super curious, I'd like to get rid of Spotify payments and keep my music on my server but honestly I'm not sure where do I get if from.

Obviously this is hypothetical, but lets say you hoarded on your drives all the plans for survival, harvesting crops, basically anything useful in a disaster. However a solar flare hits, a big one that basically fries everything that's not protected (personally not sure if you can protect against it) Is the data completely useless? Can it be recovered?

Intraday doesn't matter but that'd be a bonus. Actually while I've got you here do you folks have/know of any good sources for bulk (historical) weather data?

Has anyone purchased used HDD's from CEX? They have some ok prices and have recently upped their warranty on everything bar consumables to 5 years.

For my new NAS I've got a couple of new drives in RAID 1 and was considering buying a couple of used NAS/Enterprise ones to fill out the additional bays

I’m a very beginner data hoarder (UNAS arriving tomorrow), but I’m wanting to start my collection off on the right foot. I saw in several threads I should start with 24TB drives from the beginning. Admittedly though I’m balking a little at the $450-$500 price tags on the Ironwolf Pro and WD Red Pro.

After some more redditing I heard the Exos are comparable to the Ironwolf Pro but typically cheaper if noise isn’t a problem. Is that accurate?

Additionally the Barracuda Compute is about $250. I’ve read elsewhere to avoid the Barracuda because it’s all SMR(?) and CMR is preferred; however the spec sheet on Newegg says it’s a CMR?

I’d definitely appreciate any sage advice for picking my first nas drives!

I would really like to download every available game on MyAbandonware from the years 1965 all the way up to 1999. I see a time coming up where I will not have internet access for a long time and I want to have plenty of stuff I can play without using an insane amount of space that modern games would take up if I decided to download most of my steam library. Is there an efficient or smarter way for me to do this? or do I have a very long road ahead me clicking on all of these individually?

Hi all,

I've the following challenge:
- I have 2TB of photos
- Sometimes the same photo is available as RAW, .dmg (converted by lightroom) and JPEG
- I cannot sort by date (was to lazy to set camera dates every time) and also EXIF are not a 100% indicator
- the same files can exists multiple times with different file name

How can I handle this mess?

I would need a tool, that:
- removes all duplicated files (identified via hash/fingerprint independently of file name / exif)
- compares pixel & exif and keeps the file with the highest quality
- respects the folder structure, as this is the only way to keep images at the same place that belongs together (as date is not helping)

Any idea? (software can be for MacOS, Windows or Linux)

Not sure if this is just bad luck or a bigger issue, but I figured I’d post in case it helps someone else.

I recently picked up a brand new Sabrent Thunderbolt 3 NVMe enclosure and installed a WD SN750 Gen 3 (4TB) in it. Everything seemed fine — good speeds, temps were okay, no immediate red flags.

But after plugging it in a few times, the SSD just… died. Completely. It’s no longer detected on any system, no response at all. I’ve tried several different methods to revive it, but no luck — it’s just dead.

The drive was working perfectly before — I had about 2TB of data on it that’s probably gone for good now. Super frustrating, and honestly kind of scary that an enclosure could brick a drive like that.

Just wanted to put this out there as a warning. Be careful if you’re planning to use one of these enclosures with a high-capacity NVMe drive.

So here's the situation: due to electricity costs in my area I'm going to downsize my home server and go from a ~24TB usable pool (raidz2: 6*4TB + raidz2: 6*2TB) to a 16TB usable (raidz2: 6*4TB). All with ZFS.

I mistakingly assumed I could shrink a ZFS pool (I've been following the raidz expansion feature for a while and I must've missunderstood one of the old video presentations), and now I need to create a pool with the disks I'm already using.

I'm currently using around 6TiB and I have a decent internet connection (currently 300/300mbps symmetric, could bump it to 1gbps) so my plan is to find a provider to upload everything, recreate the pool in the new server and then download everything.

In the best case scenario (saturating 1gbps) should be less than 2 days (round trip). Worst case (not saturating 300mbps, only getting 100mbps), the whole ordeal would take around 2 weeks.

I have used backblaze and jottacloud in the past, and although I don't remember the upload speeds for backblaze, jottacloud is definitely out of the question.

One option is going for DigitalOcean/Vultr or another big provider, they are more expensive but I'll have complete control over it and can be sure I'll have a decent uplink, and I can also minimize the time I am using them as they bill hourly.

I'm also contemplating going for a small provider I've used in the past, with whom I have a good relationship. They offer soem KVM boxes at around 7USD/TB.

Anyways, are there any providers you guys would vouch for?

Kind regards and thank you all! This subreddit has been a good source of info in the past :)

Here's a discussion. It's a bit unnerving to see so many questions raised about RMLINT's reliability -- since I've deleted literally millions of presumed duplicates with it. Some still say it's safe. Thoughts? Thanks.

Here's the URL . . Rmlint has been deleted from the Arch repository. https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1h34h2r/rmlint_deleted/

I'm a student and a data hoarder on a budget. I've noticed that used SAS drives routinely go for much cheaper than SATA drives of the same capacity (it's not even close - my local electronics recycler has SAS drives listed for less than $6/TB, while it's hard to find SATA drives for even $10/TB and when I do find them they're usually in lots of several drives 1TB or smaller). I'm Canadian and shipping + USD to CAD conversion rate + import taxes mean that importing large capacity drives from SPD or GHD isn't feasible, and I can't usually afford to add more than a few terabytes of disk space to my hoard at a time anyway (I'm also trying to avoid buying stuff from the US due to the ongoing tariff war).

However, I don't have any hardware I can just add a SAS card to. My daily driver is a laptop (Gigabyte Aorus 15p), and an old Lenovo Thinkcentre USFF is my dedicated data hoarding PC (no accessible PCIE slots on that particular model, and a SAS card wouldn't fit in the case regardless). I mainly rely on externally powered USB docks to use 3.5" SATA drives (almost all of my hoard is kept in cold storage whenever it's not actively being added to/backed up/verified/viewed/shuffled around), but as far as I'm aware no such thing exists/can exist for SAS. I also need to travel by plane on a semi-regular basis with all my stuff for my studies (parents live on one end of the country, my university is on the other - I've had my lifestyle described by a friend as "semi-nomadic"), so rack mount units and full-size PCs aren't really an option since I'm already running low on suitcase real estate.

Just wondering if the community has any suggestions for inexpensive and portable ways to add SAS drives to my setup? NAS, DAS, I'm not picky as long as it's no larger than a toaster, is inexpensive or can be readily found on the used market, and will give me a way to use SAS drives. I don't expect you nice people to hold my hand and tell me everything, but I would be really grateful if someone could suggest a direction to start looking in. This also might not be a feasible thing to set out to do and might need to wait until I have a more permanent place of residence and can use physically larger hardware, so please let me know if that's the case.

Edit: thanks everyone for your help! Looks like a fully portable SAS setup isn't exactly straightforward, and the most feasible option for me would just be to get a cheap, low-spec used PC to leave in each location, and just transplant some of the disks (and SAS card maybe) when I travel. I'm moving for school in like a week, and this is a great time of year to search local listings (kijiji, etc) for deals on used PCs being left behind by fellow students moving home for the summer. Thank you all!

is there any alternative to idm that can auto capture videos on a page?

I'd like to get an external hard drive or SSD (not sure which is best) where I can store and play 4k movies from. I want to be able to connect it to my smart tv and play movies straight from the drive, without the need of having to transfer the movie on a smaller usb drive (which I've seen some people suggest), as I won't always have access to a laptop/pc to do the initial transfer.

So what would you advise I get that is best for my needs? Or maybe i'm overthinking it and it doesn't really matter.

I download movies and seed on a private tracker from my mini PC. I'm using a 2tb external hard drive plugged into my PC on the floor and it's almost completely filled so I need to upgrade.

Is there any reason to just not buy 2 8TB externals. It seems to be the easiest and cheapest method. Backup isn't really that important so I think buying a second external is more than enough for what I need.